Wow, the past 48 hours or so have been insane. What started out as a blog post I was writing while bored watching Edwards Scissorhands has now caught on like crazy throughout the gaming community. Yesterday I wrote a blog post about Video Game companies on Twitter and since then I’ve received thousands of visitors to the site, hundreds of new followers, and many many blog comments, Twitter Replies, Direct Messages and emails all requesting to be added to the list or thanking me for writing the list.

This past summer I made a blog post basically calling out video game companies for not being active in social media , specifically Twitter. In that blog post you can find some tips/tutorials I gave for how to use social media, how to monitor, etc. Please check it out if you’re interested in how I use Twitter at gamerDNA and how to use it to monitor your brand/company on Twitter/FriendFeed and blogs.

Luckily, since then a lot of game companies have signed up for twitter and they are using it for various purposes like personal use, advertising stuff they are doing(or worse..just using it as a way to post when they have a blog update via TwitterFeed integration), or even actively using it to interact with their customers/gamers and as a customer service tool.

Since things have changed since that August blog article and I haven’t really seen a list on the web somewhere of all the game companies on Twitter, I’ll try to start a list here.

I am now 21, as of about week ago on January 2nd. In the US this means I can now legally drink alcohol and gamble. Yay!

I had a small celebration at work with some coworkers on my birthday..nothing too wild or crazy. I think later this month I’ll go out and visit some of the bars with some friends from work..they’ve promised that I’ll "get smashed"…which I’m not necessarily excited about, but I’m hoping I’ll have some fun along the way

What I’m most excited about is that I’ll now be able to actually do stuff after dark after work, at conventions like PAX, or go to parties at events like GDC/PAX/etc. Working as a "professional" and going to industry events while underage over the past two years has kind of sucked when I couldn’t go to anything or had to sneak in. I *did* learn how much networking/schmoozing/professional events relied on alcohol, though

I’ve been thinking about updating my blog for awhile now…I often think of great topics but I never get down to actually doing it(obviously).

Some quick updates:

Last October I went to Blizzard’s BlizzCon, a convention for fans of all of their franchises (Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo). It was very very cool..an awesome game convention that was put on by just one company. Every marketer/game company person that is incharge of putting on events for their brand/company should go. They really take things to another level and you can’t help but go away and be excited about everything that Blizzard is doing. Hell, I’ve hardly even played any of their games and I bought about 50-70$ worth of swag

Things are continuing to go great over at gamerDNA. I’m really busy with some new responsibilities, experience, and some great mentorship/learning opportunities within the company. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings, especially the next 3-4 months. March will bring my year anniversary at gamerDNA and it is amazing to think about how far we have come in the last year.

I’m continuing to be active in the social media space…namely Twitter. I’ve got a post that I want to write this week about game companies being active on Twitter, sort of a short update in response to my post last August.

Today I voted for my first time in a presidential election and today the United States of America elected our first African America president, Barack Obama. I just got done watching his amazing acceptance speech and I am so happy right now.

(Full Disclosure: I did a write up on the gamerDNA company blog so I’m going to keep this fairly short and sweet. The purpose of this is to give my personal take and record some of the more fun, notable events)

It has now been a week since the last day of PAX and I’m still getting back into the swing of things. Last week I had the pleasure of attending PAX with three others from gamerDNA from Thursday through Monday which was the entirety of PAX. We went there on a mission: Go to the biggest gaming expo in North America and talk to people about gamerDNA. All in all, I’d say it was a success.

If you haven’t gone to PAX before, you should. This was my first time going to PAX and it was the biggest gaming event that I’ve ever been to. Last year I went to SOE Fan Faire and Gen Con and those don’t even compare to the size of this event or the amount of fun had at PAX. The PAX officials have reported that about 58,500 people invaded Seattle and attended PAX, well over the 37,000 that they had last year. I wonder what they will have next year…and how they will fit everyone in the Seattle Convention Center.

Sure, many game companies are using social media these days as advertising platforms, but are they really using Social Media to the extent that they could be doing? I don’t think so. How can they step it up? That’s simple.

This week has already been a long week at work, mostly because monday we stayed until about 3am getting a brand new Quiz system implemented and up and running. Along with the launch of a brand new quiz system we launched 3 new quizzes for players to take. Now instead of just the Bartle Test (and the MMORPG and Guild quizzes that are no longer with us), we have a Gamer Decades of Influence quiz and an FPS multiplayer and RTS multiplayer playstyle quiz.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for what this system can do and we’re working right now on some new types of signatures for people to

use to show theirresults. We’re also kicking around ideas for new types of quizzes that we could put out there for people to take.

Maybe you guys could help out…why kind of quizzes would you like to take? Personally, I’m thinking of putting together a quiz for PVPers.

Lastly, I’ve gotta give a shout to Casualties of WAR , my new Warhammer Guild which is expanding to over 100 people! I’ll also give a shout to Rick over at /Random for being a nice guy and checking out my blog!

Thanks guys, until next time..happy gaming!

(PS. Since I’m being considered a blogger now I figure I should live up to that title and blog
more often now..like more than once every 2 months. You can count on more entries as time goes on )

Like the title alludes to, this week has been exciting..but really the past two weeks have been good for me. Since a decent amount of stuff happened I’m just going to dive in, so hold on!

First off, I’m very excited and happy to announce that I’ve been promoted to Community Manager at gamerDNA. It was official last week but I wanted to sit on it first before I announced it on my blog. I’m very stoked to be in this position and I’ve been told gamerDNA will be sending me to gaming events in the future to represent the company to gamers. I’ll also be more active on forums, blogs and in game communities to help represent the company there. In just about two weeks I’ll be at PAX giving away gamerDNA t-shirts and inviting people to our gamerDNA party so if you’re there, please let me know and you’ll get an invite and a shirt!

I’m still getting used to the job and all the new responsibilities and expectations but I’m enjoying it. I love the challenge and it is fantastic to be able to work with two things I love to do: working with games and working with gamers. Over the coming months you’ll be seeing a gamerDNA podcast unveiled(finally), some more contests for the 360Voice and gamerDNA communities, as well as a TON more blog posts on the gamerDNA company blog .

This week brought the August meeting of the Boston IGDA Chapter which was sponsored by Harmonix (Guitar Hero 1&2, Rock Band, etc) and Ralph Baer, who basically created home video gaming back in the 60s, was the speaker. Due to the awesomeness of Mr. Baer and Harmonix we had about 5 guys representing gamerDNA at the meeting. Mr. Baer’s speech was very interesting because we gained so much insight into how little these guys had back then technologically, but all that they did with what they had. In today’s world you could call this guy a hacker, making the craziest inventions out of what little they had, bringing the video game console to your living room.

After Mr. Baer finished his presentation Harmonix took over the stage and had the E3 preview build for Rock Band 2 for everyone to play. Incase you don’t know…Rock Band 2 hasn’t even came out yet and it has been played by hardly anyone, so it was super awesome to be able to play the game. Steve Sopp and I took the stage and rocked out, which

you can see here:

Steve Sopp (far left) on guitar and Sam Houston on Drums

You can also watch a slighly embarrassing video (for me) of us playing Rock Band 2, shot by the Harmonix job recruiter.

Finally, I’ve decided to join the Warhammer guild "Casualties of WAR ", ran by a few bloggers/fansite people I knew from Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. The guild is made up of a *ton* of MMO bloggers/podcasters and industry people, so it should be a pretty awesome time. I’m really looking forward to joining these folks in ventrilo and having a good time sacking cities and taking down some keeps.

That about wraps it up, soon I’ll be getting ready for our gamerDNA trip to PAX and I’ll be sending out invites to the gamerDNA party (with free booze!). Stay tuned